This anecdote about Google cofounder Sergey Brin is part of a startup PR launch, but it’s interesting. I wonder what the dare was. ‘I cook, you eat’ doesn’t sound like a very interesting bet:
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The victim |
[Anand] Rajaraman and Harinarayan were co-founders of Junglee, an early Web database company… In 1994, Rajaraman proudly told Brin he’d acquired a new computer with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Brin… went over to Rajaraman’s apartment and installed Linux… on his computer…Brin even took on Rajaraman’s practice of eating vegetarian, a family tradition. One evening, Brin went over to Rajaraman’s apartment, baked a fish in his oven, and served it to him with some lemon. Rajaraman ate it. [Link]
Tamarind once served me the lamb version of the paneer dish I ordered, two large, flat white squares. I downed the whole thing thinking it was the worst paneer I’d ever had and didn’t catch on until I saw the bill. Gross.
By the way, your bagels contain an extract from human hair and chicken feathers, your milk contains cattle hormones and pus, your beer was clarified with fish extract, your miso soup may contain fish broth and your Kiwi Strawberry Snapple is colored with a dye from ground beetles. Perfect recycling. I see some aren’t taking this meatitude lying down. Bon appetit!
uggh.. lamb as a paneer dish? my stomach is doing back flips just reading the post…
reminds me of when mcdonalds flavored it’s fries with beef extract or something to that extent.. i remember hearing an argument by a staunch hindu on talk radio in LA who told them he would have comitted suicide if he had known he had been eating holy cow… (a little extreme but it was pretty darn funny/sad/diabolical)
anyhow… god.. after reading fast food nation, i’m sure there are a ton more veggies out there..thank god for friendly morningstar, boca burgers, and other options for us… hence i tend to stay and cook at home.. at least i know what the heck i’m putting into my mouth..
an excellent place to look up places in your community for vegetarian restaurants is http://www.happycow.net
Oh yeah, I’m not affliated with that site in any way..just passing the good word to my fellow veggie eating brothas!
eesh thanks, Manish…you’ve got me well on the way to starting a diet – see food, don’t eat it.
Is paneer the Indian version of Tofu?
hmmm… there is one of four reasons for a person chooses to shun meat and/or specific meat preparations. Let’s do a categorization.
1. Religious precepts – as with jains, amritdhaari sikhs, jews, muslims, vaishnavs etc.
2. Incompatibility with dietary requirements – allergies, performance maximization, weight management
3. Anti-vivisection principles
4. psychosomatic aversion – general nausea associated with odor, texture etc
I’m a 10-60-30-0 (adding up to a 100)
Where do you see yourself? Because that colors how one reads this post.
I’m thinking – no big deal.
Manish and others (taking liberties) might be a 50-0-0-50 and that colors his pov.
paneer has been called cottage cheese in the west.. but i would bet my left nut that the indian preparation does not use rennet extracted from sheep stomachs, as with most grocery store cheeses
paneer is basically the curds from milk, compressed into cheese. preparation is so easy you can do it at home. and rennet free!
I think this has been posted before on SM, but here is a list of vegetarian cheeses.
Has anyone heard anything about the amino acid L-Taurine – in supplement form – being derived from animal sources ? I’ve read things saying it is, and other thing saying it isn’t. Chemists, anyone ?
Wow, Dhaavak, your list reads like propaganda. You missed the big three, and ‘psychosomatic’ = ‘it’s all in your head.’
Because your family is
Moral: You’re killing sentient things for the sake of a tastier sandwich
Health: Shortens your lifespan; risk of parasites and prions
Chowing down on corpses strikes you as unappetizing
manish… your reasons are well aligned with the list i presented … and enriched for the added color i must add. to illustrate …
family = socio-religious precepts = #1
health = dietary requirements = #2
cruelty to animals => anti-vivisection =#3
unappetizing corpses = psychosomatic = #4
and i did not imply psychosomatic in the sense “it is all in the head” – i meant it in the sense that a person has a physical reaction like nausea, breakouts to meat, meat-based products without necessarily ingesting said product.
I may have been more detached in my comment but we agree… really.
Vegetables are great and all, I mean,I’m def. a fan. But I just can’t get away from beef cravings, no offense to those who don’t dig it. I don’t force others to eat meat, but hate when they give me crap about it.
And as a sidenote- for some reason the past two years, a majority of the men I’ve met have been vegetarians, no matter what race. Hooray for them, but can’t I just meet a man who wants to share a nice steak with me? 🙁
Eww ew ew that was the worst-timed SM check I’ve ever done — I was just taking a break from work and enjoying a nice big glass of milk and some cookies and then I was prompted to find out exactly how much cattle hormone and pus my milk contains by your link up there, Manish, and I was greeted by a nice picture of a poor mama cow with mastitis. I’m curious to see how harmful a little cow pus could be after pasteurization but I couldn’t read anymore and still enjoy my milk.
FD, I know what you mean. I was raised vegetarian and my mom won’t allow meat in the house but my dad likes his flesh, and introduced us kids to it. I try hard to be vegetarian but I get huge cravings for chicken and sushi. (I am WEAK.) I LOVE the Morningstar/Boca alternatives but they are a little pricey compared to their corpse-derived counterparts.
Iowa City is an extremely liberal place, and after 8 pm one of the local channels becomes “The Vegan Channel” which is usually v. nice and shows beautiful vegan people making fast and easy vegan things but some nights gets all angry and shows how exactly chickens, cows, and pigs are butchered. After seeing one of those specials I’ll swear off meat but I always come crawling back after a few weeks.
same thing happened to me. i was having my morning cereal when i read about the milk pus. it was not appetizing. yuck yuck yuck.
Manish, I believe THE snapple flavor which uses cochineal is Mango Madness. (I remember this b/c I really liked it, and how ironic that the most desi flavor is the least Vaishnav friendly.) There might be a couple of their newer spinoffs that do too. But I’m pretty sure Kiwi Strawberry does NOT have it—cochineal/carmine are not Kosher, and Kiwi-Strawberry is definitely Kosher.
Personally I have long wanted to agitate for a legally enforced label, along the same lines as the Kosher label and the California Organic label, that certifies something is free of animal-derived ingredients. For one thing, it would actually include most Kosher and Halal labels—since all the rules for Kosher/Halal have to do with meatiness or lack thereof, and lack of insect parts. I kind of see it as a cultural right, but one which is currently too unpragmatic to pursue. Forget Diwali-tokenism, I’d rather have this label as a sign of “respect” for my community. In general I am a big fan of legally-enforced, no-false-advertising certified, meaningful labelling that fully informs the consumer about the nature of the product–organic, fair trade, kosher, post-consumer recycled, etc. I see the lack of such labelling on most consumer products as a great failing in our implemention of the “free market.” Until the information about what I’m buying is mine for the asking, and until I have the freedom to access that information fully when making my consumer choices, I don’t feel there is really such a thing as a free market.
Re: milk—my hardcore vegan friends always give me a hard time that if I want to be really true to the principle of being kind to cows, I shouldn’t drink milk b/c in the United States dairy is one of the most animal-cruel industries around. At least most non-veal beef cattle spend their days in pasture and are “only” slaughtered—it’s increasingly easy in Cali, anyway, to make sure your beef was never in a factory farm. I do see it as a bit of a failing on my part, but I try to make up for it by mainly sticking to dairy products bought from organic local dairies (Strauss, Brown Cow, Clover) that are known to treat their cows well as long as they have them, so the cattle spend their days with plenty of real food and air and room, and when they are killed it is quick and relatively painless. (I have yet to find a good commercial dairy that does not send their aged cows to slaughter instead of putting them out to pasture, or sell the male calves to cattle ranchers–though when I was younger I knew hobby dairy-ists who took good care of their cows and the male calves, and never allowed them to be slaughtered.)
If I ever become faublously rich high on my list of projects is to build a model, scalable farm wherein the livestock are treated kindly, killed only along the same lines that one would kill a pet dog or cat (i.e. put down in old age to avoid excessive pain), and managed in as environmentally-friendly a fashion as possible.
While I was slightly disgusted when I heard that story about Brin, I do have to point out that Google’s cafeteria is now very good about informing desis about the appropriateness of the various offerings.
Great post.
man…that is so uncool.
i am over the omnivores who react defensivelyto vegetarianism [whine mode] You don’t say anything except quietly mention at a restaraunt that you are veggie, and a particular brand behaves as if you’ve been proselytizing. I’m constantly maused at their defensiveness [/whine mode]
I’m curious as to what flavourings are used in the those “fake meats,” particularly the ones used in some East Asian veggies restaraunts…are they chemically derived or clever veggie use? anyone?
Funny caption but Rajaraman is hardly a victim. However persuasive Brin might’ve been, a no one held a knife to homeboy’s throat, right? The only place the knife was, was in Rajaraman’s hand, next to the baked fish with lemon.
He was just another desi dude trying to be cool.
I remember talking about the McD’s beef fries case over lunch with some classmates. Even though I personally was not very offended by it, I think it is preposterous to feed someone meet if she thinks it is not. Some Hindu groups had succesfully sued the corporation. I remember that a white person (only one on the table) protested that its too much to sue them, and if you dont want to eat it, just dont eat it. The point was, that McDonalds did not advertise the product to be 100% vegetarian certified. I think many people assume a previleged normative in many issues. A colored sister rightfully quipped whether McDonalds would have been seen in the same light if they were feeding dog meat in their cheeseburgers. The line about freedom only goes as far. I think people have a reasonable expectation of trust from other people. If I invite you over for salad and potato curry, it is reasonable to assume that I will not feed you beef. Otherwise we will all have to eat at home, there will be no restaurants, and we would never have dinners at other peoples places.
Good grief… It’s like blind people (or associations of blind people) suing internet providers for being unfair…
Living in the United States (or Europe for that matter), we may manage to live nearly vegetarian lives (ie not eating meat), but a vegan life (ie absolutely NO use of animal products) is now impossible: we are surrounded by rendered cattle, which can be found in shampoo, toothpaste, soap, vitamins, etc., not to mention adhesives of all stripes, photographic film, plastic packaging–even the tarmac of some highways.
See Verlyn Klinkenborg’s essay, “Cow Parts,” from Discover magazine (Aug, 2001) [an ostensibly subscription-only pdf file, but available on Proutist Int’l] : http://www.proutist-universal.org/pdf/cow_parts.pdf
bleugh.
Vegetarians of the world unite! I wish we had more here in the UK… 🙁
sunny: you think you would since veggie fare is so prevelant and available in every supermarket (TESCO, SAINSBURY’S)–heck their deli’s carry samosas and panner sabji…
hence for me england is a veggies paradise..as i think manish mentioned before on his travels around the globe recently
Would you believe it – I am drinking a Bass Ale as I am reading this. I thought there was something fishy about the taste. This just ruined my morning.
there’s always Soy Milk (which doesn’t taste bad at all), soy patties to put in your vegburger, and so on.
There are a lot of alternatives. Buying cheese is a pain in the ass here in Canada. You never know what might have what. So I made a few inquiries, and apparently, the rennett (sp?) used is artificially made. Still, I’m cautious.
Thanks for the link though: http://cheese.joyousliving.com/
Very cool.
Trader Joes actually has a handy pamphlet that spells out the rennet content in most of their cheese products. Albertson’s carries a brand of brie that’s rennet free, I’ll have to go see what it’s called. I often write to people who make specialty cheeses, and they’ll usually just tell me–it’s often surprisingly common how many crafted American cheeses are rennet free. Whole Foods Berkeley cheese section used to be AWESOME. . .the most informative cheese person in town. . .haven’t been there in a while though. I used to keep track of what restaurants used rennet free cheese and eat accordingly–and my sister is still ruthless about asking and choosing, but I’ve lost track and the habit, and one of my new year’s resolutions is to be better about tracking these things and not giving in to the “Unknown Pizza” so easily. The thing is, pretty much only very particular Hindus and the most Orthodox of Jews care enough to both want to eat Cheese but not want to eat rennet–two groups not usually known for frequenting non-ethnic restaurants–so restaurants will tell you if something is vegan or not, but rennetless is usually too complex for them.
Anyone else in the Bay Area care enough to help me get individual restaurants to be more informative about the cheese content?
i’m surprised you say that… unless you’re really picky… i’ve seen rennet free cheddar, stilton, gorgonzola, you name it … in most any farmers’ markets … a little pricy since they are english imports most of them… step into st. lawrence or kensington if you’re in TO… i’ve even seen some paneer with brandname namdhari here … pretty sure they dont put crap in it to make it taste better… seen similar stuff in st jacobs, montreal and in kitchener… and i’ve just chanced upon these ‘cos i really dont care… my latest fav cheese is a polish cheese from a butcher shop… so there…
someone suggested soy milk, take a look at the ingredients … they should have a biohazard symbol on those cartons.
after seeing the discovery channel, i always want to become vegetarian. alas, its hard
after seeing the discovery channel, i always want to become vegetarian.. alas, its hard
Unlike some vegetarians, I am very pro-just-eat-less-meat. I do get annoyed when pollo-pescatarians claim to be vegetarians, b/c that muddies up the waters when it comes to making other people realize that my dietary requirements are non-negotiable. But there are a lot of strategies one can take just to reduce one’s meat intake without necessarily worrying about the nitty gritty on labels or even the less finely resolved technicalities that go with being a vegetarian. These labelling issues are important for the cultural and principle-of-consumer-information reasons already mentioned, but I’d hate to see them turn into a despairing excuse for people to simply give up. I have one friend, a big, athletic Scottish-German-American who’s quite a picky eater, and was pretty much raised as a meat and potatoes guy–but after reading fast food nation, he gave up beef. He just decided that was a piece of the right thing to do that he could handle, and he handled it. He often says he wishes he could be a vegetarian. Maybe he can, maybe he can’t. In theory who knows. He may try again. But for now, he gave up beef. I have enormous respect for that kind of pragmatic attempt to at least shave off some part of the problem.
Because it really is a problem. What this labelling issue reflects is the fact there there IS SO MUCH waste from the meat-industry in this country that it is cheaper for the chemical industry to use it as feed stock and make all these crazy “natural” ingredients then it is for people to make things like beer in a sane, comprehensible fashion. Ranchers and factory-farmers literaly pay people to get rid of the crap–corpse-crap and regular-crap—piling on their grounds.
what gets me is the animals in the shows eating another animal without a care in the world, and then to think about how we eat animals without a care. the mass consumption is part of the problem in a way; if i could say a prayer of thanks after killing a buffalo maybe i wouldn’t feel so bad. one time someone was saying that eating meat introduces a kind of violence into your spirit; i half wonder if we as humans are violent toward each other because we in some way are not mourning the living beings who die for our food.
alas, quite morbid thoughts
the thing is … the few ranchers and farmers i’ve met are actually compassionate folks who take deep care of their animals … of course – to be statistically accurate – that may actually be a reflection of me in the people who are drawn to me rather than a sampling of the farming universe – this one time i was boarding with 3 other folks – one a rancher from ok – i made a casual statement that one of the reasons i dont like eating meat is because of gratuitous cruelty and god knows where the meat’s coming from in the supermarts – one got deeply offended and started off with “Boy, …” … well he kind of went overboard… anyhow, my rancher buddy – and this guy used to have people come over to our apartment to trade in bull semen – had a meaningful discussion with me. He explained his practices, in how he manages his animal feed etc. – i said i wasnt comfortable with animal farming practices – cramming, hormones etc. – and he explained govt regulations – we agreed to disagree. i learnt something about his trade and he understood some of my concerns that might influence his farming practices positively in the future.
To the person who complained about the ingredients in soymilk. Silk soymilk has
“Filtered Water, Whole Organic Soybeans, Organic Evaporated Cane Juice, Calcium Carbonate, Sea Salt, Natural Flavors, Carrageenan, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D2, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12.” (source: http://www.whitewave.com/index.php?id=34) I don’t see any ingredient that is a “biohazard”.
I’m not promoting silk soymilk, merely attempting to dispel your notion. Please don’t spread FUD if you don’t know what you’re talkign about.
buddy… if you and your kids have been imbibing the stuff – good for you man – rock on. Dont take it personally – i just dont like processed stuff. to each his own.
Manish, it’s bad enough you’ve turned my stomach off baked goods. Did you have to print the whole list?
haha i love how the vegan desis are spreading around paranoia about food… (for cripe sake that milk link is run by PETA… theyre the most nut-brained group of idiots running around… talk about ridiculous activism) and the compound L-cysteine can actually be found in red peppers, garlic, onions, broccoli, brussel sprouts, oats, and wheat germ as well. The fact is, its basically economically inefficient and implausible to maintain a purely vegan diet… lets not freak about it
haha desi dude in austin i totally agree man… buddy boy rajaraman cant be a ‘victim’ …way to blow it out of proportion.. texas desis rule 🙂
OK.. that milk link was disgusting.. and so I went to look up soy milk, and I found this.. now I’m totally confused.. I’m going to have to swear off cereal now.. 🙁
Soy Milk Is Safe! (not)
well.. nycpepe… i guess the news is positvie on the whole … if one keeps drinking enough soymilk, one will become a self-contained unit for supplying the cereal bowl… watch out for those high notes tho’
i kid, i kid. 🙂
My flatmate, Jewish guy, makes soy milk. Simple. Soak beans overnight in plenty of water, blend in mixer, boil 12 minutes and strain. Soy milk! Use the sediment as porridge! Cheap, fresh, etc. etc.
Re being veggie/vegan, you do the best you can, as Jainism says. There are degrees of evaluating your actions/ choices. Jains remind you, the worst is unkindness to another human. So the real concern is about kindness, reverence for life, not ritual or personal purity.
From a very early age I instinctively felt, eating animals was unjustifiable. I didn’t need to eat chopped up farmal animals parts, so what was the real reason I was being made to? The majority of people like all other animals follow the crowd, it seems? It’s not difficult to be vegetarian now and as Paul McCartney was quoted to have said “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian”. Going veggie (or hopefully vegan) doesn’t show a weakness, it shows a persons sense of compassion and depth of concern for the environment which all sentient beings (animals whether they be of land, air or sea) share.
People who knowingly fool veg*ns into eating flesh are sick.
It is so easy to be a vegan in United States. Loads of wonderful vegan products such as tofu, tempeh and vegan icecream is easily available in numerous stores across Unites States.
http://www.traderjoes.com is a great store for vegan shoping